In a passionate address yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry called
inaction on carbon pollution “just plain immoral,” as it is “gambling
with the future of Earth itself.” Kerry’s
remarks
were made at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., setting the stage
for this December’s international climate negotiations in Paris.
“Lincoln took risks, Gandhi took risks, Churchill took risks, Dr. King
took risks, Mandela took risks, but that doesn’t mean that every
risk-taker is a role model. It’s one thing to risk a career or a life on
behalf of a principle or to save or liberate a population,” Kerry said.
“It’s quite another to wager the well-being of generations and life
itself simply to continue satisfying the appetites of the present or to
insist on a course of inaction long after all the available evidence has
pointed to the folly of that path.”
“Gambling with the future of Earth itself when we know full well what
the outcome would be is beyond reckless,” he continued. “It is just
plain immoral.”
“And it is a risk that no one should take. We need to face reality.
There is no planet B.”
Kerry also called for a renewed global commitment to cutting carbon
pollution to avoid the 2-degree-Celsius warming threshold agreed to by
President Obama. Using language that could have practical policy
implications, Kerry argued that energy-investment decisions must
“include the long-term cost of carbon pollution.”
It is time, my friends, for people to do real cost accounting. The
bottom line is that we can’t only factor in the price of immediate
energy needs. We have to include the long-term cost of carbon
pollution. We have to factor in the cost of survival. And if we do, we
will find that pursuing clean energy now is far more affordable than
paying for the consequences of climate change later.
Such decisions notably include the long-awaited Presidential
determination on the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline, which if built
would have the carbon-pollution impact of 40 new coal-fired power
plants.
The Secretary of State made
reference
to the news uncovered by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting
that Florida governor Rick Scott’s administration
censored
use of the words “climate change,” “global warming,” and “sea level
rise.”
So when science tells us that our climate is changing and humans
beings are largely causing that change, by what right do people stand
up and just say, “Well, I dispute that” or “I deny that elementary
truth?” And yet, there are those who do so. Literally a couple of days
ago, I read about some state officials who are actually trying to ban
the use of the term “climate change” in public documents because
they’re not willing to face the facts.
Now folks, we literally do not have the time to waste debating whether
we can say “climate change.” We have to talk about how we solve
climate change. Because no matter how much people want to bury their
heads in the sand, it will not alter the fact that 97 percent of
peer-reviewed climate studies confirm that climate change is happening
and that human activity is largely responsible. I have been involved
in public policy debates now for 40-plus years, whatever, since the
1960s. It is rare, rare, rare – I can tell you after 28 years-plus in
the Senate – to get a super majority of studies to agree on anything.
But 97 percent, over 20-plus years – that’s a dramatic statement of
fact that no one of good conscience has a right to ignore.
Climate activist group Forecast the Facts is
petitioning
for an investigation.
Kerry’s speech had one factual misstep – he claimed that the first
Senate hearings on climate change were held in 1988, when Dr. James
Hansen famously warned Congress that global warming was already
measurably affecting the climate.
Climate change is an issue that is personal to me, and it has been
since the 1980s, when we were organizing the very first climate
hearings in the Senate. In fact, it really predates that, going back
to Earth Day when I’d come back from Vietnam. It was the first
political thing I began to organize in Massachusetts, when citizens
started to make a solid statement in this country. And I might add
that’s before we even had an Environmental Protection Agency or a
Clean Water Act or Safe Drinking Water Act or a Marine Mammal
Protection Act or a Coastal Zone Management Act. It all came out of
that kind of citizen movement. And that’s what we have to be involved
in now. And the reason for that is simple: For decades now, the
science has been screaming at us, warning us, trying to compel us to
act.
And I just want to underscore that for a moment. It may seem obvious
to you, but it isn’t to some. Science is and has long been crystal
clear when it comes to climate change. Al Gore, Tim Wirth, and a group
of us organized the first hearings in the Senate on this, 1988. We
heard Jim Hansen stand in – sit in front of us and tell us it’s
happening now, 1988. So we’re not talking about news reports or blog
posts or even speeches that some cabinet secretary might give at a
think tank. We’re talking about a fact-based, evidence-supported,
peer-reviewed science. And yet, if you listen to some people in
Washington or elsewhere, you’d think there’s a question about whether
climate change really is a problem or whether we really need to
respond to it.
In fact, the first Senate hearings on climate
change
were 11 years earlier in 1977, when the science subcommittee of the U.S.
Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Technology held a series of
four hearings on the National Climate Program Act. The first House
hearings on the same act of
legislation
were a year earlier.
The risk of fossil-fueled climate change was brought to the Congress’s
attention by President Lyndon B. Johnson in his February 8, 1965
address on the
environment, now over
fifty years ago.
Transcript of full remarks: